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Thursday, 10 August 2017

A poem by Michelle Reale

Buona Domenica

My
small fingers broke the box-shaped dirt, revealing delicate, thread-like
roots.My father knelt beside me.I pressed the orange marigold roots into the
dirt he’d prepared. He blessed himself
then touched my forehead. It left a smudge that I was proud of.Clouds moved across the sun while my father
continued to dig. I had moved on, not far from him. I chalked the sidewalks, drawing arterial
roots to somewhere I didn’t yet know existed.My father said I had cartography in my blood.
When he held the crushed leaves of a marigold under my nose, I knew that
somehow, we had breached arbitrary frontiers.Smells like pepper, no?He brushed the dirt from his knees and held
his hand out to me.We smelled the
garlic hitting the oil from my mother at the stove, inside. The wind carried more than sound. My father told me how roots were so fragile,
can break so easily. It took me years to understand. I read the future in the
lines carved into the back of his sun-browned skin.We held a willing suspension of belief as long
as we could.Basked in the kind of
radiance that came from speaking out of turn, in the immediacy of a moment
sharp as cut glass.It was the only language we knew.

Michelle Reale is an Associate Professor at Arcadia University. She holds an MFA in poetry and is the author of five collections and the forthcoming The Marie Curie Sequence from Dancing Girl Press. She has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.